Senior Lecturer, School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University. PhD Cultural Studies.
I have an MA and PhD in cultural studies from the UK where I also worked in Museum Studies for a few years. In Malmö I’m primarily involved in the MA in Communication for Development program. Over years I have been concerned with popular memory, music, oral history and stories of migration and conflict in remembrance genres. Lately there has been a new emphasis on youth and media through Unicef projects in Tanzania and Mozambique.
In Living Archives I am exploring practices of reclusion working in tandem with generally celebrated modes of openness and transparency. As an important addendum to a general desire for openness, I’d advocate for a plurality of discrete ‘residences’ or archives – and a variety of citizen arkhons (in control or authority of the archive), which – when the purpose is right – can open itself to and with others. An archive may be accessible and even hospitable, yet intimacy and interaction may in many cases be important citizen empowering additions to grand, public and often nearly dormant archives?
My activities in Living Archives have included analysis of a Malmö Folk Song archive, as well collaboration in the Women Making History project (these two with Erling Björgvinsson), and thirdly a series of cases on the opening of the journeys of enigmatic lives that have been through migration or/and conflict. This has led to some wiki entries and a book project preliminarily named ‘Reclusive Openness’. Parts of this begun with the Living Archives Openness-series on medium.com